Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

Can you please help me out about how to format a .csv file through unix script?
Set of complete commands would be useful or also share few links if available.

---------- Post updated at 09:00 PM ---------- Previous update was at 08:59 PM ----------

I am talking about in terms of font, size, color change through script.
hOW WE CAN DO IT ON A FILE WHICH CONTAINS VARIOUS HEADINGS AND NORMAL TEXT.

You need to be more precise. You cannot change font unless you use a specially formatted file like rich text. This is more of a windows thing. Color usually requires html. If the file is supposed to be straight ascii, then you can use ANSI escpae codes.

Are you creating a mail message?

What are you trying to do exactly? We need font name, colors, and so on.

Lets foget about the color for the moment.
I have generated a .csv file. but before i use that in windows as I am emailing it to the ids, I want to change the font and size especially for the few static lines in the file. for eg: whatever i am echo'ingin the file, i want to display as bold in the .csv file.

Please let me know if you want some more inforamtion on this.

---------- Post updated 11-18-10 at 12:01 AM ---------- Previous update was 11-17-10 at 09:24 PM ----------

Can anyone help me out with my below query please?
I think I just require an example/syntax to do the same.

None of this is just simple shell script code

I think you need to reconsider some of your assumptions about windows files. Once you do this: it is no longer a csv file that Excel can read. You will have retain and also email a separate real csv file for excel users. A csv file is not meant to be read as display in a PC mail window with an html rendering engine. csv and html are two entirely different beasts. And in windows: to get fonts, as I already said, requires special formatting. Not csv.

You'll need to write a small perl script. There are some perl tools already out there:
Text::InHTML - search.cpan.org
This simply converts text to html, you can use sed to add extra font & bold tags. It creates everything as the same font.

.xls format files directly support fonts, bold colors, etc.
You can download staroffice. It has an API that will let you create .xls compatible files for windows office.
This requires a lot of C coding. There are similar perl modules, they require perl code to make them work.

Someone may have written a big set of shell/perl scripts to do some of this, but I do not know anything about it.
Because of the way Microsoft chose to format .xls files, most shell tools are somewhat clumsy for creating packed structs. python, perl, and ruby can all do that for you easily.

Jim, Thanks alot for your help. It was really a helpful information fr me.
However, can I do this font change etc formatiing in.xls file through shell scripting?
If not then I will pick one of the alternative provided by you above

I still require help on this Please:
The problem is: In bash shell, when I am sending a file through attachment to the email ids then the format is getting changed. for eg: the file (.txt or .csv) looks fine on the unix box, but when I attach it and send it to the email id, the format get changed. All new lines comes in the same line and it looks so weird without new line.
I am not bother about the file extension, it could be anything .csv or .txt or anyother but data should display properly when send it to email ids.
How can I acheive this?

please clarify input and desired output.